Truck race, Cup qualifying at Talladega prove eventful

Saturday's events at Talladega featured several notable events with the Camping World Truck Series race, followed by Sprint Cup qualifying. During the Truck race, there were a number of crashes, including one in which Turner Scott Motorsports' Ben Kennedy went on his side for a few seconds, and one a few laps into the race involving German Quiroga of Red Horse Racing and other drivers. Championship leader Johnny Sauter and his ThorSport teammate Matt Crafton also encountered issues with their trucks, with Sauter exiting the race with a dead engine, while Brad Keselowski's driver Ryan Blaney, another championship contender, fought his way back up front after leading several laps but then having to serve a drive-through penalty on pit road. Blaney's teammate Tyler Reddick had won the pole, but soon dropped back to about mid-pack. The race was won in a green-white-checkered finish by Quiroga's teammate Timothy Peters, with two underdogs, Tayler Malsam and Spencer Gallagher, finishing second and third.

Up next was Cup qualifying, which had a few tweaks to it to accomodate the superspeedway's restrictor plate racing style, including the first round being split into three segments with different drivers in each segment. There was some confusion regarding the qualifying times of some of the 46 drivers entered into the race. First, Joey Logano and Kyle Busch attempted to start one last lap during the first round at almost the exact moment time ran out (the rules state that if a driver starts a lap near the end of a round, it counts as long as the lap begins before the clock hits 0:00; the lap still counts if the clock runs out in the middle of that lap). NASCAR reviewed this moment and declared that Logano and Busch were a fraction of a second short of the line when the clock ran out, and thus threw out their last laps.

After the second round, it appeared that Joe Nemechek had taken the #29 Toyota of RAB Racing to the team's first Cup start. The third round ended with Michael Waltrip Racing driver Brian Vickers on the pole, and Terry Labonte, driving for Frank Stoddard, qualifying ninth in what is planned to be his 890th and final series start, in a throwback paint scheme different from the one he planned to race in, but was disallowed by NASCAR. The three drivers initially reported as having failed to make the race were Justin Allgaier of HScott Motorsports, Reed Sorenson of Tommy Baldwin Racing and Ricky Stenhouse Jr. of Roush Fenway Racing (the second straight week a Roush car has failed to qualify for a Cup race). However, Nemechek's car wound up failing post-qualifying inspection. NASCAR disqualified him as a result and put Sorenson in the race in Nemechek's place. RAB Racing was obviously disappointed at this turn of events. Also notable is that Tony Stewart had to use his past champions provisional to get into the race because he had one of the slowest cars.

It was indeed a wild day of racing at Talladega. And with Sunday's Cup race being important due to being the end of the Contender round of the Chase, it will end with four drivers eliminated, and those four drivers could be some that almost nobody expected if the race is as crazy as the Truck race and Cup qualifying session.